by Dave Stone
The Doctor looked at him, aghast. ‘Oh, did you really? And did it occur to you that the uncontrolled linking of two quantum state-vectors with distinctly different energy slopes would result in the massive exchange of energy, creating an explosion or implosion that would be devastating either way?
What did you call this idea of yours, a Demon Bomb?’
‘Well, uh...’ Haasterman at least had the grace to look shamefaced. ‘We provisionally nomenclaturised it as the Golgotha Project...’
‘The place of skulls,’ the Doctor said with a snort. ‘You know, it never ceases to amaze me. You people pick up things faster than almost everybody else in the known universe - concepts and processes for which others strive for millennia before they so much as begin to grasp them - and then you just bang them together until they go boom.’
‘You people...?’ asked Haasterman, puzzled.
‘Never mind.’ The Doctor turned to Crowley, with what was Almost a snarl. ‘So just what did this “Golgotha Project” of yours entail?’
This was the early 1960s and the height of the Cold War, a time of fear-fuelled, low-grade mass hysteria that had had America rooting out so-called subversive elements with all the ferocity of an Inquisition, accumulating a weapons stockpile capable of cracking the planet open more than fifty times over - and would have it escalating a sabre-rattling police action in Asia into a land war that, for various logistical reasons, it had not a hope in hell of winning.
This was also a governmental system that, while ostensibly a form of democracy, was prone to having notions that seemed like a good idea at the time: like infecting Negro populations with syphilis and leaving them untreated, or knowingly exposing whole battalions of troops to dirty cobalt-bomb fallout without protection, just to see what happened. Life, if not cheap, was easily expendable by anyone who might manage to convince themselves that it was being spent in the interests of preserving Truth, Justice and the American Way.
So when the idea of the Golgotha Project was first mooted, and rather like it had been with the aforementioned dirty-fallout tests, it was relatively easy to squeak it past the congressional powers that be by producing actuarial tables to the effect that the possible deaths involved would be nothing compared with the deaths incurred if the Commies beat them to the punch. The town of Lychburg in the great state of [classified] was chosen as the first test site by the highly technical statistical process of sticking a needle (first sanctified with arcane guidance-rituals) into a map and picking a geographically self-contained and out-of-the-way population centre near where it ended up.
Section Eight specialists moved in and, under the guise of conducting a marketing survey, transformed the town to fit the necessary
parameters;
first
by
subliminal
mass—
conditioning and then by complete narcoleptic and operant-conditional brainwashing on an individual basis. Certain members of the body politic who proved intransigent at this stage, who took it into their heads to wander around shouting about how the town was being taken over by alien pod-people and the like, were summarily excised. The end result was an entire population that, as one, could be led, upon the application of certain stimuli, to act and think and Believe with all their hearts in ways, in ideas and in things at their controllers’ will.
Thus far, thus good, and nothing out of the bounds of conventional physics. Rather like Germans believing in Aryan Supremacy, or Christian Fundamentalists believing in the coming of Judgement Day, any delusion imposed upon the population of Lychburg would effectively change reality within the confines of that population, because it would inform their very thoughts and acts whatever the literal truth of it. The problem was, of course, that while the entire population of Lychburg might believe that Demons had appeared, for example, summoned from the very Mouth of Hell to sweep down upon and destroy the enemies of then nation - and while they might think and act precisely as if that were the case - the number of demons appearing in the real and physical sense was, in actual fact, zippo.
The tertiary phase of the Golgotha project was to turn the effective into the actual.
While the processes and rituals of Magic were, at root, just tools in the mental kit that allowed the summoning and channelling of Power, they would have been nothing had that Power not existed, to some extent, in the first place. Scattered across the Earth and through its history were certain objects of a mystical nature, thought of in more credulous times as divine, devilish or sorcerous; in more contemporary, if not enlightened times, as alien - if not from another planet, then at the very least not of the world we know. Cursed burial treasures, pieces of the True Cross, mystic rune stones, brass bed-knobs and swords of invincibility lobbed at passing knights by a samite-wearing woman in a pond.
Many such items could be explained - or at least explained away - in the prosaic terms of technological innovation (of course King Arthur’s sword made him invincible, or rather the prototypical steel swords of his men made them invincible when they fought against people armed with bronze), or mistranslation, or sly jokes aimed at the overly gullible (good luck in finding a peacock’s egg). But the fact remains that a percentage of these items, in one sense or another, existed.
When Edward Alexander Crowley was recruited by Section Eight and brought over to America, he took several such items with him. The particular nature of one of these remains classified, as do records of its essential origin. It was simply codenamed the Arimathea Artefact.
It is unclear whether the artefact was intended as the equivalent of a primary trigger in a nuclear device or as its payload. In any event, its function was to serve as a focal point. Key individuals in the conditioned Lychburg populace were implanted with superconductive transceivers (a restricted technology that would not find its way on to the open market for several decades) that linked them directly to the artefact and served as channels for the force of the belief of those around them.
At last, after more than three years groundwork, the site was ready for preliminary testing. The Section Eight specialists were removed to what was thought to be a safe distance, and command-code images were streamed to the Lychburg population. The image consisted of something simple, easy and culturally familiar to the American Midwestern mind - the opening of the Gates of Hell.
The result was complete and utter disaster.
‘This is mostly based on years of analysis by the number crunchers,’ said Haasterman. ‘I mean, what can we really know from dimensions that we can’t even imagine...?’
‘What indeed,’ said the Doctor, shortly. He seemed to be barely restraining an utter sense of rage.
‘Something opened up,’ Haasterman continued, seemingly not noticing this, his eyes slightly vague as though lost in some private memory that was being replayed in front of them.
‘The camera monitors showed nothing, just an area of blank phosphor, and then they went dead. The sensor-readouts showed a... a rift opening up, a conduit to some other dimension, somewhere else - and then things went haywire.
From the analysis, it seems that something came from another somewhere else, another direction entirely. It impacted with the rift and it...’ His voice trailed off as he tried and failed to come up with words to explain what had happened.
‘I was there,’ Crowley continued, taking up the story. ‘In the control cabins before we were forced to decamp. It was like a dome of alchemical light - vitreous, gemlike and consuming.
Something lived within it, screaming and writhing in the light. Something...’ He frowned, as though in mild, quiet puzzlement. have encountered wickedness in various forms -
have been called wicked myself, if you’ll recall - and I think I know something of evil. This thing gave off the impression of an Evil so pure that I cannot express the magnitude of it - utterly inimical to life, all life as we can possibly know it. The mere presence of it seemed to harbour... not death, precisely, but negation. The negation of life.’<
br />
‘It expanded at what I should say was a fast walking pace -
easily slow enough for us to make our retreat from it, but there was a sense of unstoppability about it, chewing through the bedrock of the land, its apogee ever rising. I have no doubt that if left unchecked it would have eventually consumed the entire world. Fortunately, contingency plans -
though I had not been aware of them myself at the time - were in place.’
‘We had bombers overflying the area,’ Haasterman said.
‘We were able to deploy a nuclear strike.’
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ the Doctor said. ‘Tactical nuclear strikes seem to be the fashion around these parts.
And did such a crude attempt work?’
‘Apparently so,’ said Crowley. ‘I and my cohorts were caught on the edge of the primary blast - but fortunately I have some small expertise in conjuring up, as it were, a degree of personal protection. Additionally, it seemed, the globe itself soaked up a large part of the energy expended and the resulting fallout. I was the only survivor, however. Later, when I and suitably protected staff returned to investigate the result, we found that the globe had contracted leaving a crater with a ball of some unidentified matter physically floating in its centre.’
‘Unidentified matter?’ the Doctor asked.
‘We have carefully refrained from so much as touching it,’
said Crowley. ‘Who knows what the effect might be? Visually, it appears to be a perfect globe of some metallic and mirror-bright substance. Appeared, I should say...’
‘From what the number crunchers say,’ added Haasterman.
‘The theory is that the strike knocked it out of dimensional alignment, causing it to collapse under reality as we know it.
It’s remained in that state for decades without changing...’
‘One of the things you really ought to know about me,’ said the Doctor, seemingly inconsequentially, ‘is that in some ways I’m occasionally gifted with second sight. Or possibly hearing.
Can you guess what I’m seeing, or possibly hearing, right now?’
Haasterman nodded. ‘The globe’s destabilising, changing in ways we can’t predict - and we have no way of stopping it.’ The Doctor shrugged, rather scornfully. ‘So heave another bomb at it, why don’t you? You did it before, so why don’t you do it again?’
‘That remains, of course,’ said Crowley, ‘a last resort.’
The Doctor turned to stare at him anxiously. ‘That was a joke. You do realise that was a joke, don’t you?’
‘Quite so.’ Crowley became slightly more confident and expansive, in direct proportion to the Doctor’s sudden apprehension. ‘And this brings us to why we’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to bring you here. We’ve known for quite some time of your existence as an alien life form here on Earth...’
Haasterman was startled, suddenly suspicious. ‘What’s this about an alien? You told me he was -’
‘Well, I’ve known of your nature for quite some time,’ said Crowley. ‘and of your access to technologies of which we can only dream. We intend to appropriate them, quite frankly, Doctor. Our need is, after all, far greater than yours.’
The Doctor regarded him blankly ‘I don’t think so.’ He reached out and shook Crowley’s hand, then a slightly bemused Haasterman’s, with a cheery mockery of civility that made his underlying feelings of pure loathing abundantly clear.
‘Thank you so much for bringing the matter to my attention -
though a little less of the circumlocution might be nice, next time. The matter will be dealt with momentarily. And now, if you’ll excuse me...’ He turned his back on both of them and started towards the TARDIS.
‘Oh no,’ said Crowley with his easy urbanity. ‘I really don’t think that will do at all. This is far too important to leave to what, I gather, is a notoriously cavalier and slipshod attitude. If you refuse to give us what we need, we’ll have to use more direct means of persuasion.’
Haasterman, meanwhile, had picked up a telephone handset and was mumbling into it. Now he put the handset down again and nodded briefly to Crowley.
An access hatch in the big hangar doors swung open and a pair of figures trooped through under armed guard. The Doctor took one look at them and his face split into a sunny smile.
‘Brigadier! Romana! I must admit I was getting slightly worried about you both. I’m so glad you’re not dead.’
‘That,’ said Crowley, his voice hardening as the black-clad troops already gathered in the hangar turned their weapons on the new arrivals, ‘can still be easily arranged.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Everything Merges in the Night
As night fell in Lychburg, every single one of its inhabitants -
whether man, woman or child - decided they would like to go to a certain place. If you had asked them, they would have come up with perfectly natural and logical reasons why this was so, but if you had pressed them they would probably have become restive. If you had pointed out that it was a little strange that every single one of them had decided to go to a particular place that night, if you had pointed out that this was, not to put too fine a point upon it, the behaviour. of people who were not in their right minds, the good people of Lychburg would no doubt have murdered you, horribly and brutally, on the spot.
Had it been possible to achieve an aerial view of this exodus, the levitating observer would have noticed something strange. It was not the fact that from this hypothetical height those on foot seemed to be keeping pace with those in vehicles, at what must have been an insane and ultimately enervating run. Nor was it the fact that over two hundred thousand living beings were managing to do this with the spontaneously regimented coordination of an army of soldier ants. It was the fact that these people were travelling in completely opposite directions, heading out from all points of the compass, but somehow ending up in exactly the same place.
When the Mind that lived within them all had taken control of any individual directly, It had left that individual with an unnamed and irrational desire to take or make some vaguely human form, and fashion it into new positions. Now that process was to be repeated on a larger scale.
* * *
The woman in the haberdashers had grasped Victoria by the throat and suffocated her into a swoon, despite her attempts to scratch and claw at her attacker. She had come back to herself in an office, handcuffed to a metal chair, where a man in a uniform with a peaked cap, a badge on his jacket reading SECSERVE SECURITY, had been holding a telephone apparatus to his ear. The man’s eyes were as dead as those of the woman who had attacked her, and he had spoken no words at all, either into the telephone or to Victoria herself. She had the distinct impression that this was being done not to serve any function, but as a travesty of the procedures by which people ordinarily did such things. Presently, a pair of policemen of the same sort that had apprehended herself, Jamie and the Doctor when they first arrived here, had come into the office and silently and implacably dragged an entirely unsilent and struggling Victoria to their automobile, where they had flung her into the luggage compartment in the rear and slammed it shut behind her.
After a knee-and-elbow-skinning drive, the automobile had stopped. Victoria had nothing with which to tell the time, so she was uncertain as to how long she had been left in the compartment, but through the crack in its hatch she had seen the light from outside fade. It seemed that it was now night.
Abruptly, the hatch swung upwards. Standing over her were the two policemen, their outlines dead black against the lightly starlit night sky. From within each of their eyes there issued a dim, bluish glow.
They dragged her out, and silently hauled her over to a dark shape that, from the look of it, was another, larger conveyance. Two more figures were there; a third was lying at their feet. The policemen flung Victoria painfully down beside it and it stirred and groaned. It was Jamie.
‘The pack of them took me down,’ he said, recognising her.
‘Knocked seven shades of, uh, Sunday out of me and threw me out in the midden for dead.’ He jerked his head toward the two figures standing by him, who had been joined by the policemen. All four were now standing still as statues, the lights in their eyes directed squarely on their captives, watching over them. ‘Yon scunners came along and brought me here.’
‘And where precisely is here?’ Victoria asked him.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said.
Victoria cautiously climbed into a crouch and craned her neck around. Nothing but the night, the sound of things in trees, the distant murmur of the city. She stood up to take a better look around. Smoothly and without warning, one of the dark figures stepped forward and shoved her down. The hard earth stung at knees already the worse for wear, and she let out a hiss of pain.
‘Are you all right?’ Jamie asked her.
‘I’m fine,’ she managed, biting back an exclamation which would, if let out, have been rather stronger in nature than bless me. ‘I thought I saw a set of lights coming,’ she said when the urge to emit oaths like a guardsman had subsided. ‘Of the sort they have on automobiles. Someone else is coining, I think.’
Later, when a number of varieties of dust had settled and Victoria was in a position to review events with some small degree of equanimity, she would admit that this was, in all probability, the greatest understatement she was ever likely to make.
For the moment, though, they both heard and saw the automobile Victoria had mentioned approaching. Four figures, as opposed to the two each guarding Victoria and Jamie, dragged out a fifth, instantly recognisable as the Doctor. Victoria’s joy in seeing him was slightly marred by the fact that he seemed to be unconscious. His body sagged, supported by arms gripped on each side, and his head lolled bonelessly. When he was dropped to the ground next to Victoria and Jamie, he landed in a twisted heap and steadfastly refused to move at all.
‘I don’t think he’s getting up...’ said Jamie, in the slightly worried tones of one who had been hoping that the reappearance of the Doctor might be the prelude to a dramatic and ingenious rescue, but was coming to the realisation that this was not to be the case. He got no further because at this point a certain number of important things, if not everything, changed.
